Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Guest Post - T3 Fantasy Tournament - TO's Report from Hamish Forbes

Here is a tournament report from Hamish Forbes the TO of the T3 Fantasy event held in Tauranga over the weekend. I asked Hamish to flick me through how it went and he's penned the following:

Over the weekend (10/11 Sept) the Tauranga Club in association with the Tauranga Boys’ College club ran a 2400 ‘no comp’ tournament. The only restrictions were no named Special Characters and a max of 12 Power Dice/Dispel Dice per player per magic phase.

We had 12 players enter, and in general the lists were not excessive. I was expecting some very hard builds, but there weren’t any really. I think several armies would have failed the ‘Pete-Lite’ test, I know mine did (2 Pump wagons, 2 Mangler Squigs), despite this the end results were fairly close. There were a few big wins, a few close games, and several victories snatched from the jaws of defeat (and vice-versa). The Top 5 were:

The whole tournament was played in great spirits. The check-list sportsmanship scoring worked well, with only 2 players not scoring 100% (and those only dropping 1 point). In particular James Rumble, the school student who played in his first tournament and got beaten every game, competed well. He learnt something every game and got voted Best Sport.

What was very pleasing was the variety of armies, two Empire (one with 6 pieces of artillery, flagellants and War Altar…), two Daemons of Chaos (a Nurgle and a Khorne) and one each of Dark Elves, Warriors of Chaos, Bretonnians, Wood Elves, Orcs and Goblins, High Elves, Lizardmen and Tomb Kings I think we will keep a similar format next year, and hopefully attract more players as a result.

Here is an excerpt from an email that Tim Lind of Hamilton (and holder of the Empire icon, for today at least).

“Just wanted to say a huge thank you to you guys for running such a cool event. I had a great time, and enjoyed every game (especially my losses actually!) and will definitely try to support future events that T3GC run. I definitely liked 'no-comp' for this tournament, even if you do decide to add hard or light caps in the future. I think everyone brought the right spirit to the event, and even those with less conventional builds (ahem... 6 war machines... ahem) were balanced out by scenarios versus more balanced builds. There was a great deal less ill-feeling generated by not being told not to bring something, unlike some other events I have been to. The venue was great, lots of room, felt very relaxed. As with most tournaments, 4 games in one day can be rough but heading home early on Sunday was also very nice!”

So all in all, we think the decision to go ‘no-comp’ was right. Many people took “fun” lists that they would otherwise not be able to field, others took harder lists, but nothing really over the top. Because players knew it was open comp, no-one complained because they knew what they were getting into. It was a great point of difference for the tournament, and we were very pleased.

Thanks to all the players who attended. You all made it a great weekend.

Well done to Hamish and the Tauranga and Hamilton gamers for running what looks like was a very fun event.